In Buried, a claustrophobe's worst nightmare, Ryan Reynolds plays Paul
Conroy, an American civilian contractor in Iraq. Captured by insurgents after his convoy is attacked, Paul is buried alive by kidnappers hoping to
extort a cool $5 million for his release. Do you like Ryan Reynolds? Would
you like him in a box? Going crazy, like a fox? Would you, could you,
endure 95 minutes of such a thing? See TIME's Fall Entertainment Guide

Or should you? Honestly, I'm torn. On the one hand, the movie is
interestingly aggressive; from the opening scene (heavy breathing, darkness)
it basically jams our fingers into our mouths and forces us to bite our
nails to the quick over Paul's plight. He has a cell phone, a lighter and
some water. With that and Evelyn Salt's underwear, maybe he could make a
bomb to blow his way out. Director Rodrigo Cortes intends us to feel
trapped, twitchy and unhappy and at the same time, wildly grateful we're not actually in the box like Paul. I could do without that kind of guilt trip
from a film. See photos from America's war zones.

Buried, set in 2006, is filled with a sense of justifiable yet nearly
unbearable outrage over the U.S. presence in Iraq. His kidnapper, Jabir (Jose
Luis Garcia Perez, a stereotypical Middle
Eastern villain who hisses unintelligibly), is briefly hopeful that Paul works for Blackwater, a name
bound to cause a kneejerk reaction in the audience; it's become shorthand
for how we've been jerked around and ripped off as a nation in this war. But
Buried is almost as interested in pointing out how hard it is to make a
phone call in this day and age without being put on hold, or how likely a
heartless corporation is to place its interests above those of the human
beings who work for it. Screenwriter Chris Sparling is mad as hell about
contemporary life, and he's banking on us feeling the same way.

For all Reynolds' movie star appeal, Paul is an ordinary guy. He has $700 in
his savings account. He came to Iraq because he was desperate to
make some money for his wife and son back home. He's not Angelina Jolie's
Salt or a super sleuth; in fact his first phone calls are achingly mundane  to
his own answering machine in the States, and to 911. "I'm in a coffin!" he
tells the emergency operator, and is asked, with the fake patience reserved
for the insane or simple-minded: "Are you in a funeral home?" As he
continues to encounter doubting Thomases and hold music, he grows more
shrill, more appalled at the idea of falling through the cracks. "I'm an
American citizen," he says. "Just send someone to find me." The movie wants
us to recognize the arrogance of this line of thinking.

On the plus side, as Buried unfolded in heavy-handed horror, it gave me
every dirty little thing I asked of it. Wouldn't it be interesting, I
thought, if the film never left the box, like a more extreme version of the
2003 thriller Phone Booth, in which Colin Farrell was essentially chained
to pay phone by a psychopath? But what are the odds Cortes would be so bold? It's Ryan Reynolds, after all, he of Van Wilder and The Proposal. He's
charming, but not exactly Das Boot material. And how exactly are we
supposed to see his abs in a coffin?

When the camera pulls back a foot or two into the dirt, you're prepared to
enter the real world  maybe a Stateside visit with Paul's despairing wife, or
a look inside the offices of the Hostage Network, where a crew is
frantically trying to track Paul's cell phone signal. My anticipation was
smug; we all know what those sequences in a movie look like.

But no: Cortes is a submarine driver who doesn't surface, and Buried
stays buried for its entire length. There's not even a view from
immediately above (a vantage point that was perhaps the most chilling aspect
of the Dutch buried-alive thriller The Vanishing, from 1988). My
admiration for Cortes' artistic integrity was tinged with irritation, that
kind of good-for-you-but-please-stop-doing-that feeling you might get when
an idealistic young relative starts lecturing you about American
slaughterhouses just as you begin to carve the holiday roast.

The realization that we're stuck in the box too is supposed to give us even
greater sympathy for poor Paul. But because the movie seemed so pleased with
itself for remaining there, my thoughts drifted instead to pity for
Reynolds, who must have had to
perform horizontally for weeks on end. That's the gamble you take with a
gimmick: it tempts the audience to focus on deconstructing the setup, rather
than feeling the circumstance. The same goes for the film's radical climax,
something my nastier impulses had half-hoped for.
If the aim is to be unpredictable and to revel in cynicism, you run the risk  realized here  that the movie becomes more an authorial statement of purpose than a story the audience can believe in.